Posted: 03/11/2000

Mission to Mars

(2000)

by Tom Morgan

“…planet Mars was blue and there’s nothing I can do?”

If you’ve ever wondered who we are and where we’re going as a species, just look toward that reddish light far in the cold reaches of space. That’s Mars, the planet named for the Roman God of War. It’s a hostile, presumably lifeless world, a mysterious place that draws our imagination and admiration.

And it’s the setting for director Brian De Palma’s latest cinematic outing, Mission to Mars, a film that attempts to answer all those questions by placing you on the red planet to be witness to perhaps the greatest question of all: Where do we come from? The film is a purpose-seeking extravaganza that, unfortunately, dips into cliché for its resolution that may some viewers slightly disappointed.

With Mission to Mars, Touchstone Pictures rolls out its first blockbuster hopeful of the season, a big-budget, big cast, big everything film that will apparently be the start of a slew of other Mars movies and television events. The Red Planet has never been more popular.

So, on to Mars!

The year is 2020, and a base camp has been established on Mars. Mars One Mission Commander Luke Graham (Don Cheadle) and his crew of three are drawn to a strange object atop a mountain, an object they think is - literally - the tip of the iceberg. When they get there, the silvery object spouts a voracious funnel that gobbles up all but Luke.

He’s stranded on this harsh world. But is he alone?

Think again.

When a distress signal is relayed back to the Earth-orbiting World Space Station, Commander Woody Blake (Tim Robbins), Astronauts Jim McConnell (Gary Sinise) and Phil Ohlmeyer (Jerry O’Connell), and Rescue Specialist Dr. Teri Fisher (Connie Nielson), are sent by NASA on a rescue mission, though no one’s sure whether or not Luke will actually be alive by the time they get there, six months later.

Now, back in the 1970s, images of what appeared to be a humanlike face carved atop a large mountain were beamed back to earth and were largely ignored by scientists, though emphatically embraced by extraterrestrial seekers. Well, screenwriters Jim and John Thomas, and Graham Yost, give you another mountainous face that’ll have Believers shouting, ‘We told ya!’

So, that iceberg that caused a demonic cyclone to wipe out the crew of Mars One? It’s a face. And that’s when Mission to Mars takes a fatal turn.

What I look forward to in Brian De Palma movies are those quirky scenes added to lighten the drama and remind us that, despite psychotic murderous drag queens, psychic daughters, boxing scandals, etc., we’re just human beings trying to get through the day. That, and what appears to be his long, signature opening shots, is part of the fun of watching his movies.

De Palma doesn’t let you down in Mission to Mars. He breaks from the lull of space to a charming scene where Woody and Terri waltz in zero gravity to Van Halen’s ‘Dance the Night Away.’ It’s a cute scene.

But we get thrust back into the story when their rescue ship is suddenly disabled and abandoned just shy of pulling into the Martian orbit. It’s one of the film’s more dramatic and suspenseful sequences and, despite evident danger - is there no deadly radiation is space? - our quartet must drift through upper Martian atmosphere to the REMO, or the Resupply Module.

Woody, unfortunately, doesn’t make it, but we come to find out that Luke is alive and has been trying to decipher what the face is telling us.

[WARNING - SPOILER AHEAD!]

Alas, Mission to Mars gives you a very soft landing after a hard ride as it ends flatterthan it began. It almost felt as though the writers ran out of steam and grabbed the first sci-fi cliché they could find. Case in point: just as the rest of the crew is about to scramble for their lives, astronaut Jim McConnell, who through out the film mourned the passing of his wife, Maggie McConnell (Kim Delaney), utters, “I’m home.”

Whatever that means, no one knows, because like many sci-fi films of late, vagueness is either a plot point of a resolution.

For all Mission to Mars’ dazzling visuals, however, you learn virtually nothing about Mars the planet - the one we’re supposedly settling some time around 2020 - other than it’s sometimes very windy and everything is red. For example, did you know that Olympus Mons is the largest volcano in our solar system? Or that Valles Marinaris is over4000 kilometers long? Or that a Martian day is 24.6 hours long? I had to look this stuff up. The film does throw the theory that Mars once had vast oceans and a life-sustaining atmosphere that was subsequently wiped out by a gigantic meteor. It serves as a jolting reminder of what a violent place this universe is.

Techno-babble aside, De Palma’s keen action/suspense directing, along with the cast’s superb acting, certainly lends a hand to Mission to Mars’ high drama and shows us that even astronauts have a heart. And, as always, the digital artists at Industrial Light and Magic, and Dream Quest Images have created an absolutely dazzling array of special effects. The screen is filled with the colors and textures of Mars, placing the viewer right there alongside the characters.

Mission to Mars is an ambitious, overwhelming film that poses seemingly unanswerable questions - something that many blockbusters do not - and it assumes you know too much about space exploration to explain why our characters are there in the first place. It seems inevitable these days that when aliens show up in a film, the mission will end in failure, but we may learn something along the way. We can only hope that subsequent ‘missions’ will fare better than this.

Tom Morgan is a writer who misses the good old days when story was supposed to drive the film!

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